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Microbiological Research Centre of ‘Movile’ Cave Ecosystem

Part 2 Project 2015Felicia-Constantina MilitaruIon Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism Bucharest RomaniaThe need to build such a centre originated in the peculiarity of the ‘Movile’ cave ecosystem, an important discovery that revealed the home of live new specimens. This species have been around for 5.5 million years and can be studied to discover what life looked like in the distant past. Moreover, according to NASA scientists, living conditions in this subterranean environment are the closest to the ones on Mars, where liquid water is proven to have existed, hence deeming the cave ecosystem an accessible environment for studying life on other planets, here on Earth.

The concept of my proposal consists of this verticality, the human relationship with the unknown and intangible, the unusual scale of the landscape in which it resides and last but not least, the space and materiality of the traversed environments.

With minimal intervention towards both the space above ground and the underground space, the design proposal represents that type of architecture that connects two fundamentally different worlds, revealing a space that exists independently of the our act of building and infilling.

...It is just like looking into the ground to see distant galaxies using a mirror like projection of the sky on Earth... Felicia-Constantina MilitaruTutor(s)